L'histoire truquée par les Anglais

Cartagena de Indias, le pire désastre militaire de l'âge de la voile. Une défaite que les Anglais s'obstinent à cacher au monde.

L'histoire maritime est le domaine des Anglais et ils veillent à ce que la réputation de leur pays soit sans tache.

Je suis le seul à révéler qu'en plus de deux siècles, les historiens anglais, si prompts à décortiquer la moindre des campagnes de Nelson ou encore les malheurs de l'Armada d'Angleterre, se gardent bien de s'intéresser au pire désastre du XVIIIe siècle, la défaite humiliante de l'invincible armada anglaise qui, sous le commandement de lord Vernon, a fait voile vers le Nouveau Monde pour s'emparer des provinces américaines de l'Espagne.

Les Nord-Américains, qui ont perdu beaucoup de jeunes gens de bonne famille dans cette déconfiture anglaise, sont les seuls à aborder la question à travers le sort de leurs soldats.

Après avoir rappelé que sur 5000 jeunes colons anglais ayant rejoint lord Vernon, moins de 500 sont revenus, l'auteur américain Charles Winslow Hall dans son roman publié en 1898 Cartagena : or, The lost brigade; a story of heroism in the British war with Spain, 1740-1742, écrit :

Of the failure of the several expeditions under the direction of Lord Vernon, history has heretofore been remarkably silent; and for some reason, with the exception of the attempt on Cartagena, the operations of the English fleet and army in the West Indies from 1740-44, inclusive, seem to have been kept from the English public with astonishing success.

Une traduction rapide : « L'histoire [anglaise] est restée remarquablement silencieuse sur l'échec des différentes expéditions conduites par lord Vernon. A l'exception de la tentative sur Carthagène, les opérations de marine et de l'armée royales dans les Indes occcidentales entre 1740 et 1744 ont été occultées pour quelque raison au public anglais avec un succès étonnant. »

Cet ouvrage s'inscrit dans l'effort de mobilisation du public des Etats-Unis contre l'Espagne dans cette guerre de conquête et de rapine où la puissante Amérique va s'emparer de Cuba, de Porto-Rico et des Philippines.



Pour lire l'intégralité du roman de Charles Winslow Hall, cliquer ici.

La gauche, et notamment sa piétaille enseignante, a toujours cru qu'elle avait le droit absolu de disposer de l'Ecole comme outil d'endoctrinement et de transformation sociale. En France, le régime républicain a beaucoup usé de l'histoire enseignée aux enfants pour imposer une vision du passé compatible avec ses propres ambitions.

Aux Etats-Unis, l'école publique a également été un vecteur puissant du progressisme et de l'Etat fédéral. A titre d'exemple, ce sont les enseignants qui ont largement contribué à faire du médiocre Martin Luther King l'icône de vertus civiques qu'il n'a jamais été dans la vie.

Heureusement, l'Amérique est aussi un pays où la démocratie possède un large volet local et cette fois, les électeurs du Texas ont donné un coup d'arrêt à la machine à bourrer le mou aux enfants.

Cet article du très conformiste Guy Adams pour The Independent rend compte des principaux changements apportés aux programmes d'histoire au Texas et leur importance pour les livres de cours du reste du pays.

Texas to vote on curriculum that changes history

The slave trade was in fact the "Atlantic triangular trade". Capitalism, with all its negative connotations, should in future be referred to as the "free enterprise system". And don't even think about buying into the theory of evolution: children must instead be taught that God created Earth using a euphemistically-titled technique known as "intelligent design".

It may sound like the backdrop to a comedy sketch, but these are instead the guiding principles by which teachers in America's second-largest state will be forced to go about the business of education, according to critics of proposed changes to the school curriculum.

After months of increasingly fractious debate, the 15-member school board of Texas is expected today to approve more than 100 pages of new guidelines governing the teaching of social studies. They changes cover everything from Cold War history to the "correct" interpretation of the US Constitution. The proposed rules stipulate, among other things, that Republican superstar Ronald Reagan should be added to a list of "great Americans". Country music can be described as an important cultural movement, but hip-hop can't. And speeches by Jefferson Davis, the slave-owning president of the Confederacy, should be taught alongside those of Abraham Lincoln.

Et pourquoi pas ? Jefferson Davis représente fort bien le courant de l'histoire américaine qui affirme les droits des Etats sur ceux du gouvernement fédéral. Le fait de l'écarter au simple titre qu'il possédait des esclaves est un anachronisme ridicule.

Elsewhere, the new curriculum changes references to American "imperialism" to "expansionism", and forces teachers covering post-war politics to tell students that Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious anti-Communist show trials during the 1950s may have been justified.

L'expansionisme est le terme utilisé par les historiens et impérialisme par les polémistes de gauche et de droite. Quant à Joe McCarthy, le sénateur avait mis le doigt dans la plaie et la haïne que lui voue la gauche est la preuve de la valeur de son action.

Most controversial of all is a rewriting of a passage in the syllabus dealing with economics. Previously, it stipulated that eighth-grade students must learn how to, "explain reasons for the development of the plantation system, the slave trade, and the spread of slavery". In the re-worded version, the words "slave trade" were replaced with: "Atlantic triangular trade".

Ce changement peut défriser les bonnes consciences de gauche mais il est ridicule d'isoler le commerce des esclaves de leur contexte comemrcial, le commerce triangulaire.

The elected school board includes dentists, housewives, and other laymen who have little teaching experience. Like a growing number of legislators in an increasingly-polarised country they are, however, politically divided: every one of the 10 Republicans on the committee support the proposed revisions; all five of the Democrats oppose them. At stake is education in not just the Lone Star State, but across the entire country. Texas has almost five million students, and is the largest market for new textbooks in the US. It is also one of the few states that gives its school board power to rewrite, rather than just rubber stamp, the curriculum.

In recent years, the board's annual meetings – they review a different subject each year – have turned into a noisy media circus, as lobbyists from both left and right seek to exert influence on the increasingly conservative committee. A record 206 people signed up to testify during this week's hearing.

Among the critics of the proposed changes was Rod Paige, the first African-American education secretary, under George Bush. "In Texas, we've allowed the pendulum to swing backwards and forward," he said. "I'm asking that the swing [should] be narrower and let history speak for itself."

Social conservatives, however, accuse the left of cherry-picking tiny passages from a wide-ranging document to criticise the new syllabus in its entirety.

"Most of the complaints are coming from a liberal fringe," said Jonathan Saenz, a spokesman for the Liberty Institute. "They're making a huge issue out of some very small changes. The people of Texas are simply trying to stop atheists and the extreme civil liberties lobby from taking over their history."

Triangular trade

Taking place from West Africa to America, America to Europe, and Europe back to West Africa, the lucrative international transactions from the 17th to 19th centuries were indeed triangular – and also reliant on slavery. First, slaves were shipped to North America, where they were put to work growing cash crops – such as tobacco – which were exported to Europe. The Europeans who made use of those crops went on to use their goods – such as rum, distilled from Caribbean sugar – to buy slaves in Africa. There have been other examples of triangular trade, but few so ruthlessly efficient

Le journaliste affiche ici son ignorance. Le point de départ du commerce triangulaire se trouve en Europe. Les commerçants chargent leurs navires de marchandises que les Africains souhaitent échanger contre leur principale exportation : des êtres vivants. En Afrique, les Européens chagent les hommes que des Africains leur vendent et les transportent en Amérique, au Brésil, dans les Caraïbes et vers les futurs Etats-Unis. A destination, les esclaves sont vendus et les navires ramènent en Europe des marchandises tropicales, notamment du tabac du sucre et du café.

Les points importants sont les suivants :

Les Européens exportaient des marchandises de prix en Afrique. Remplir les cales d'un négrier représentait un capital important.

A l'inverse des musulmans qui pratiquaient en Afrique des véritables chasses à l'homme, les Européens n'ont pas mis d'Africains en esclavage. Le changement d'état, de libre à servile, était le fait des élites africaines, les mêmes qui sont aujourd'hui au pouvoir en Afrique.

Pour en savoir plus :

Traite des Noirs et navires négriers au XVIIIe siècle


Patrick Villiers


Editions des 4 Seigneurs, 1982, 162 p., ISBN 2-85231-079-1 (rel.)

Loi et histoire, un couple diabolique

Le 5 décembre dernier, dans les colonnes du Los Angeles Times, Ian Buruma, professeur au Bard College, a publié un article fort pertinent sur les dangers qu'entraîne la volonté de légiférer sur le passé. Le livre le plus récent de cet auteur est Murder in Amsterdam: The Killing of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.

Legislating history

The law is too blunt an instrument to deal with a nation's mistakes.
By Ian Buruma

In October, the Spanish parliament passed the Law of Historical Memory, which bans rallies and memorials celebrating the late dictator Francisco Franco. His Falangist regime will be officially denounced and its victims honored.

There are plausible reasons for enacting such a law. Many people killed by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War lie unremembered in mass graves. There is still a certain degree of nostalgia on the far right for Franco's dictatorship. People who gathered at his tomb earlier this year chanted "We won the civil war!" while denouncing socialists and foreigners, especially Muslims. Reason enough, one might think, for Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to use the law to exorcise the demons of dictatorship for the sake of democracy's good health.

But legislation is a blunt instrument for dealing with history. Although Spain's new law won't put historical discussion out of bounds, even banning ceremonies celebrating bygone days may go a step too far.

The desire to control both past and present is, of course, a common feature of dictatorships. This can be done through propaganda, distorting the truth or suppressing the facts. Anyone in China who mentions what happened at Tiananmen Square (and many other places) in June 1989 will soon find himself in the less-than-tender embrace of the state security police. Indeed, much of what happened under Chairman Mao Tse-tung remains taboo.

Spain, however, is a democracy. Sometimes the wounds of the past are so fresh that even democratic governments deliberately impose silence in order to foster unity. When Charles de Gaulle revived the French Republic after World War II, he ignored the history of Vichy France and Nazi collaboration by pretending that all French citizens had been good republican patriots.

More truthful accounts, such as Marcel Ophuls' magisterial documentary, "The Sorrow and the Pity," were, to say the least, unwelcome. Ophuls' 1968 film was not shown on French state television until 1981. After Franco's death in 1975, Spain too treated its recent history with remarkable discretion.

But memory won't be denied. A new generation in France, born after the war, broke the public silence with a torrent of books and films on French collaboration in the Holocaust as well as the Vichy regime, sometimes in an almost inquisitorial spirit. The French historian Henri Russo dubbed this new attitude the "Vichy syndrome."

Spain seems to be going through a similar process. Children of Franco's victims are making up for their parents' silence. Suddenly, the civil war is everywhere: in books, television shows, movies, academic seminars and now in the legislature.

This is not just a European phenomenon. Nor is it a sign of creeping authoritarianism. On the contrary, it often comes with more democracy. When South Korea was ruled by military strongmen, Korean collaboration with Japanese colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century was not discussed -- partly because some of those strongmen, notably the late Park Chung-hee, had been collaborators themselves. Now, under President Roh Moo-hyun, a new "truth and reconciliation" law has not only stimulated a thorough airing of historical grievances but has led to a hunt for past collaborators.

Lists have been drawn up of people who played a significant role in the Japanese colonial regime, ranging from university professors to police chiefs -- and extending even to their children, reflecting the Confucian belief that families are responsible for the behavior of their individual members. The fact that many family members, including Park's daughter, Geun-hye, support the conservative opposition party is surely no coincidence.

Opening up the past to public scrutiny is part of maintaining an open society. But when governments do it, history can easily become a weapon to be used against political opponents -- and thus be as damaging as banning historical inquiries. This is a good reason for leaving historical debates to writers, journalists, filmmakers and historians.

Government intervention is justified only in a very limited sense. Many countries enact legislation to stop people from inciting others to commit violent acts, though some go further. For example, Nazi ideology and symbols are banned in Germany and Austria, and Holocaust denial is a crime in 13 countries, including France, Poland and Belgium. Last year, the French Parliament introduced a bill to proscribe denial of the Armenian genocide too.

Even if extreme caution is sometimes understandable, it may not be wise, as a matter of general principle, to ban abhorrent or simply cranky views of the past. Banning opinions, no matter how perverse, has the effect of elevating their proponents into dissidents. Last month, British writer David Irving, who was jailed in Austria for Holocaust denial, had the bizarre distinction of defending free speech in a debate at the Oxford Union.

Although the Spanish Civil War was not on a par with the Holocaust, even bitter history leaves room for interpretation. Truth can be found only if people are free to pursue it. Many brave people have risked -- or lost -- their lives in defense of this freedom.

It is right for a democracy to repudiate a dictatorship, and the new Spanish law is cautiously drafted. But it is better to leave people free to express even unsavory political sympathies because legal bans don't foster free thinking, they impede them.

En savez-vous plus que de jeunes Américains ?

L'examen d'entrée au College comporte une épreuve de 60 questions à choix multiple qui couvrent de larges aspects de la culture générale. En voici quelques unes. La liste complète est disponible dans le rapport Are the Nation's Colleges Failing America?

(les bonnes réponses sont : 1, b; 2, d; 3, d; 4, d; 5, b)

1. The federal government's largest payout over the past 20 years has been for:
a) Military.
b) Social Security.
c) Interest on the national debt.
d) Education.
e) Foreign aid.


Percentage of correct answers
Freshmen: 24.04
Seniors: 20.82

La question la plus facile :

2. In his "I Have a Dream" speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
a) Argued for the abolition of slavery.
b) Advocated black separatism.
c) Morally defended affirmative action.
d) Expressed his hopes for racial justice and brotherhood.
e) Proposed that several of America’s founding ideas were discriminatory.

Percentage of correct answers
Freshmen: 79.93
Seniors: 85.74

La question la plus difficile :

3. According to just-war theory, a just war requires which of the following?
a) Approval by the International Court of Justice.
b) Endorsement by democratic vote.
c) A threatening shift in the balance of powers.
d) The authority of a legitimate sovereign.
e) That no civilian casualties occur.

Percentage of correct answers
Freshmen: 15.83
Seniors: 19.34

La question où les seniors ont brillé :

4. The stated U.S. objective of the 1991 Persian Gulf War was to:
a) Block Soviet expansion in the Middle East.
b) Defend Israel.
c) Overthrow the Iraqi government.
d) Expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
e) Recover control of the Suez Canal.

Percentage of correct answers
Freshmen: 53.92
Seniors: 68.40

La question qui a coûté aux seniors :

5. The power of judicial review was established in:
a) The Constitution.
b) Marbury v. Madison.
c) McCulloch v. Maryland.
d) The Bill of Rights.
e) A presidential executive order.

Percentage of correct answers
Freshmen: 52.14
Seniors: 41.67

Les jeunes Américains ont des lacunes en histoire

Dans les colonnes de USA Today, la journaliste Tracey Wong Briggs publie dans l'édition de ce jour un intéressant article sur la baisse du niveau des connaissances historiques des jeunes Américains qui entrent dans le premier cycle des études universitaires.

Students don't know much about history, and colleges aren't adding enough to their civic literacy, says a report out today.
The study from the non-profit Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows that less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. Overall, freshmen averaged 50.4% on a wide-ranging civic literacy test; seniors averaged 54.2%, both failing scores if translated to grades.

"One of the things our research demonstrates conclusively is that an increase in what we call civic knowledge almost invariably leads to a use of that knowledge in a beneficial way," says Josiah Bunting, chairman of ISI's National Civic Literacy Board. "This is useful knowledge we are talking about."

Failing Our Students, Failing America: Holding Colleges Accountable for Teaching America's History and Institutions analyzes scores of a test given to 14,419 freshmen and seniors at 50 U.S. colleges last fall on American history, government, international relations and market economy. Freshman and senior scores at the schools, 25 selective and 25 randomly chosen, were compared to gauge civic learning.

The report generally echoes the results of a similar study done last fall by the ISI, which promotes civics in higher education. This year:

•Average scores for the 25 selective colleges — chosen for type, geographic location and U.S. News & World Report ranking — were much higher than the 25 randomly selected schools for both freshmen (56.6% vs. 43.7%) and seniors (59.4% vs. 48.4%), but the elite schools didn't add as much civic knowledge between the freshman and senior years. At elite schools, the seniors averaged 2.8 points higher than the freshmen vs. 4.7 points for the randomly selected schools.

•Harvard seniors had the highest average at 69.6%, 5.97 points higher than its freshmen but still a D+. A Harvard senior posted the only perfect score.

•In general, the better a college's U.S. News & World Report ranking, the less its civic literacy gain. Yale, with the highest-scoring freshmen (68.94%), along with Princeton, Duke and Cornell, were among eight schools with freshmen outscoring seniors.

•The average senior had taken four college courses in history, economics or political science and scored 3.8 points higher than the average freshman, a civic knowledge gain of about one point per course.

•Raw scores did not correlate to voting or civic participation, but the more seniors outscored their school's freshman average, the more likely they were to vote and be involved in civic activities.

"Several of the colleges at the lower end of our survey are some of the most prestigious in the country, with average tuition, room and board somewhere north of $40,000 a year," Bunting says. "These are the schools, although their stated mission is to help prepare active citizens, that are the most derelict in their responsibility."

While freshmen at elite colleges tended to score higher to start with, there is not much of a "ceiling effect" in which gains get harder to make closer to the top, as their scores are still not that high, says Kenneth Dautrich of the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy, which administered the study.

Still, "in many cases, these students are coming from high schools where the subject matter has already been covered," notes Tony Pals of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. "It would be a waste of their tuition dollars to sit through the courses again."

To William Galston, Brookings Institution senior fellow of governance studies, the distinctions between schools aren't as clear as the general decline in the civic mission of high schools and colleges. More students are getting more formal education than students 50 years ago, he says, but today's students have fewer civics requirements as the value of higher education is more often defined in economic terms.

"Less is being expected of secondary and post-secondary education in the way of civic education, and because less is expected, less is achieved," he says.

No one would argue that college students know enough about history or the world, but a civics test may not be the best measure of civic engagement, says Debra Humphreys of the Association of American Colleges & Universities, which promotes liberal education. Other studies have shown that college students are much more likely to vote and be civically engaged than non-students, she adds.

Says Humphreys: "It would be wrong to conclude from this study that the leadership of these selective schools is not committed to educating their students about these subjects."